History Film / HalloweenII1981

* AdaptationDecay: First Michael was a mysterious, motiveless psychopathic and potentially supernatural murderer. Here he's given a sister and a familial motive.

* AdaptationDecay: First Michael was a mysterious, motiveless psychopathic and potentially supernatural murderer. Here he's given a sister and a familial motive.

* RetCon: Michael and Laurie being siblings was a huge retcon that forever changed the direction of the series post-''Halloween III''. In the original film, Michael only starts stalking Laurie because she comes onto the Myers property with him inside, stirring his twisted fascination. Carpenter considered the story finished at the end of the first film. When Yablans demanded a sequel be made against Carpenter's wishes due to the first film's immense success, Carpenter had a hell of a time trying to find a way to force more out of a story that had nowhere else to go. Drunk and desperate, he came up with the idea of Michael and Laurie being siblings and threw that subplot into the film in order to have some story to tell beyond Michael simply killing more people for no reason. Became OldShame for Carpenter, who forever regretted this plot contrivance and refused to work on any more Michael Myers films until ''Film/Halloween2018'', when the sibling relationship was officially written out of canonicity.

** An alternate ending where Laurie is in the ambulance, thinks Michael's body is coming back to life, but it turns out to be Jimmy. She embraces him and cries as she says, "We made it."

* FailedASpotCheck: Michael is seen within visual range ''several times'', but nobody ever sees him.

* RetCon: Michael and Laurie being siblings was a huge retcon that forever changed the direction of the series post-''Halloween III''. In the original film, Michael only starts stalking Laurie because she comes onto the Myers property with him inside, stirring his bloodthirsty fascination. Carpenter considered the story finished at the end of the first film. When Yablans demanded a sequel be made against Carpenter's wishes due to the first film's immense success, Carpenter had a hell of a time trying to find a way to force more out of a story that had nowhere else to go. Drunk and desperate, he came up with the idea of Michael and Laurie being siblings and threw that subplot into the film in order to have some story to tell beyond Michael simply killing more people for no reason. Became OldShame for Carpenter, who forever regretted this plot contrivance and refused to work on any more Michael Myers films until ''Film/Halloween2018'', when the sibling relationship was officially written out of canonicity.

* SuddenSequelDeathSyndrome: Dr. Loomis and Michael Meyers, ({{Ret Con}}ed later in ''Film/Halloween4TheReturnOfMichaelMyers'').
* TakingYouWithMe: Inverted. In an attempt to kill Michael, Dr. Loomis lures him into the oxygen room, turns on the tanks, then lights his cigarette lighter while still inside the room with Michael.
* TearsOfBlood: Signifies that Laurie managed to shoot Michael's eyes.
* TooDumbToLive: Nurse Jill has been instructed by Jimmy to go to the police for help if she can't find any of the others, when this proves the case she attempts to do so but finds her car's tires have been slashed and the engine not working, undoubtedly sabotaged. She notes that all the tires on all the cars in the parking lot have been slashed. So what does she do instead of [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere fleeing the hospital on foot to fetch the police?]] She goes right back into the hospital where Michael is, to rather predictable results.
* TorchesAndPitchforks: An angry mob congregates at the abandoned Myers house, shouting and hurling rocks through the windows.
* TwoPersonPoolParty: Nurse Karen and Budd get busy in the hospital's hydrotherapy pool before Michael [[DeathBySex strangles Budd with a length of cord and drowns Nurse Karen after dunking her face into scalding water, causing her face to blister and boil]].
* VaderBreath: Michael still breathes very audibly like in the first film, although it's not as loud or constantly evident as in the preceding film.

--> '''Chambers''': That Strode girl, [[spoiler:that's Michael Myers' ''sister''.]]

** Jimmy is last seen losing consciousness (or dying of blood loss or concussion, depending on your interpretation) in his car and falling face-first onto the steering wheel. The alternate ending has him alive and well with Laurie in the ambulance.

* SeriesContinuityError: At the end of the first film, Loomis shoots Michael six times, and Michael falls off a covered balcony at the back of the house. At the start of this film, Loomis shoots Michael ''seven'' times -- despite having a six-chamber revolver -- and Michael falls off an ''uncovered'' balcony at the ''front'' of the house. The continuity error gets worse when Loomis goes around shouting "I shot him six times!" in the first few minutes of the film.

* HeroicSacrifice: Dr. Loomis blows up the room he and Michael are in in order to stop him.

* ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice: Michael stabs many people with his stolen kitchen knife and an operating scalpel.

** The head nurse is found already dead by one of the employees. The audience never saw Michael off her.
** Same with Dr. Mixter, complete with a needle to the eye.
* KillItWithFire: Dr. Loomis blows up the hospital with him and Michael trapped inside.

** The same could obviously be said for Michael himself.

* MurdererPOV: Like the first film, the audience can see Michael's point of view.
* MyCarHatesMe: Justified due to Michael tampering with cars outside the hospital.

** Loomis nearly has a heart attack when he realises that [[spoiler:Michael is still after Laurie, now helpless and unguarded at the hospital.]]

* OutOfTheInferno: The climax concludes with Michael walking out of flames, and collapsing on the floor dead.
* PoliceAreUseless: None of the police officers escort Laurie to the hospital or even stay to protect her or ask questions ''after'' she was attacked by Myers in the first flick. One uncaring marshal forces Loomis back to Smith's Grove to avoid embarrassing the state bureaucrats whose neglect made Myers' deadly escape and spree more likely than if earlier precautions were taken when Loomis asked for them 14-15 years earlier, leaving Haddonfield undefended (the marshal gets his deadly "dessert" towards the end when examining a seemingly unconscious Michael in the hospital).
* PrecisionFStrike: Bub: "Sorry, guess I just fuck up all the time"

** The scene where Michael Myers steals a knife from Mrs. Elrod happens later, and is edited to suggest he kills the old woman instead of Alice the girl down the street.

** An additional ending where Laurie is in the ambulance, thinks Michael's body is coming back to life, but it turns out to be Jimmy. She embraces him and says "we made it".

* FailedASpotCheck: Michael is seen within vision ''several times'', but nobody ever sees him.

* ForTheEvulz: After escaping from Loomis, Michael steals a kitchen knife from a nearby house, murders a random young woman, then breaks into a school where he leaves the knife driven through a child's drawing of a family ([[{{Foreshadowing}} specifically, the young girl]]) and scrawled "Samhain" on the chalkboard in blood. Exactly ''why'' he did any of this is left unrevealed.
* GrossUpCloseUp: When Michael kills a nurse by repeatedly dunking her head into scalding water, the results are shown up close.
* TheGuardsMustBeCrazy: ''Nobody'' ever sees Michael wondering the hospital at all, despite the fact that he blatantly walks past the security cameras several times.
* HeroicSacrifice: Dr. Loomis blows up the room he and Michael are in to stop him. [[spoiler:Both possible timelines presented by [[FilmHalloween4TheReturnOfMichaelMyers the sequels]] [[Film/HalloweenH20TwentyYearsLater to this movie]] show that [[SubvertedTrope both Loomis and Michael survived]].]]

While it didn't enjoy the first film's critical success, ''Halloween II'' was still very well-received by fans and was a box office success. Carpenter intended for this film to mark the end of the Michael Myers story, and [[Film/HalloweenIIISeasonOfTheWitch the next film]] in the franchise did something completely different altogether. Two of the ''Halloween'' sequels pick up after the events of this film: ''Film/Halloween4TheReturnOfMichaelMyers'' serves as a direct sequel to the events of this film with a new protagonist, while ''Film/HalloweenH20TwentyYearsLater'' ignores ''Halloween 4'' (and its two sequels) to continue the story of Laurie Strode.

* AccidentalAimingSkills: During the climax, panicking Laurie manages to [[MoeGreeneSpecial shoot Michael's eyes out]].
* AccidentalMurder: A speeding cop isn't able to brake in time and winds up hitting the drunken teen, slamming him against a parked vehicle. The victim in question is Ben Tramer, Laurie's "date" from the first movie.
* AmbiguousSituation: Did Jimmy lose consciousness, or did he die from some unseen injury he sustained off-screen? The alternate ending shows it to be the latter, although why he lost consciousness in the first place is unclear. [[note]]He clearly hits his head when he slipped and fell. Then he got up and managed to stagger around before either passing out again or dying outright. It's actually a very common presentation of certain types of head injuries.[[/note]]

* CallForward[=/=]MeaningfulBackgroundEvent: In the sole connection between the main continuity and that of ''[[Film/HalloweenIIISeasonOfTheWitch Halloween III]]'', during one scene a Silver Shamrock commercial can be seen airing on a TV in the background. (But in ''Halloween III'', the first movie appears on TV ''as a movie'', i.e., as fiction.)

* ChekhovsGunman: The first film mentions Ben Tramer, a boy that Laurie is supposed to go on a date with; [[TheGhost he never shows up on-screen, though]]. In this movie, [[spoiler:Tramer dies as the result of a car accident and subsequent explosion. His Halloween mask bears a resemblance to Michael's, which briefly makes the police and Loomis believe Michael died in the accident]].
** Marion Chambers, who just seemed to be someone who accompanies Loomis at the beginning of the first film. She comes along here and drops a huge revelation.

* CutPhoneLines: Michael does this at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital where he finds Laurie there.

* DyingMomentOfAwesome: Dr. Loomis pulling a TakingYouWithMe on Michael in the hospital was intended to be this, [[DeathIsCheap but it turned out he survived for a couple more sequels.]]

* ArtisticLicenseLinguistics: Samhain is pronounced incorrectly in the film ([[ItsPronouncedTroPay It's properly pronounced sow-an]]).

After having shot escaped killer Michael Myers six times, Dr. Loomis (Creator/DonaldPleasence) believes he has saved high school student Laurie Strode (Creator/JamieLeeCurtis), who has survived the violent rampage of the psychopath that tried to kill her. Loomis heads out of the house to find nothing on the ground but an empty spot, leading him to believe that Michael lived through the gunshots. While paramedics take Laurie to the local hospital to recover, Haddonfield police and Dr. Loomis search for Michael, unaware that he has learned of Laurie's location -- and that he has a hidden reason for wanting to kill Laurie...

** A different young man just so happens to wear the same outfit and mask that Michael has on, only with blonde hair instead. It ends up misleading Loomis and the police, and leads to him getting killed when he’s distracted (by Loomis shouting and pulling a gun on him) and walks in front of a speeding police car, which plows him into a parked van that explodes and instantly burns him to death.

*** What’s more, he turns out to have been Ben Tramer, Laurie’s crush mentioned in the first movie.

** A character so happens to wear the same outfit and mask that Michael has, only with blonde hair instead. It ends up misleading the police and Loomis.

* AccidentalMurder: A speeding cop isn't able to brake in time and winds hitting the drunken teen, slamming him against a parked vehicle. The victim in question is Ben Tramer, Laurie's "date" from the first movie.

* CerebusRetcon: Doubles as FridgeHorror. The revelation that Michael is [[spoiler: Laurie's older brother]] suggests that in the opening of the first film, when he is walking towards his parents with a bloody knife while they were coming out of the car, [[spoiler: he might well have been on his way to murder her as a child while she was sitting in the back seat.]]

[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/halloween_2_ii_poster_1981.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:300:NightmareFace aside, whoever did this cool jack-o-lantern deserves an award.]]

* TooDumbToLive: Nurse Jill has been instructed by Jimmy to go to the police for help if she can't find any of the others, when this proves the case she attempts to do so but finds her car's tires have been slashed and engine not working, undoubtedly sabotaged. She notes that all the tires on all the cars in the parking lot have been slashed. So instead of [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere fleeing the hospital on foot]], she goes right back into the hospital where Michael is, to rather predictable results.

!! ''Halloween II'' contains examples of the following tropes::

** Sheriff Brackett is last seen leaving the scene of his daughter's slaying in order to tell his wife what happened. After that he simply disappears from the film (or the franchise, for that matter), despite his actor being billed third in the credits.

** In the same scene, the way Janet discovers Doctor Mixter's corpse is identical to the way Ms. Bates's corpse is found in Psycho, and is immediately attacked by the killer thereafter, though the one in Psycho actually survives. It isn't surprising given that Jamie Lee Curtis is the daughter of Marion Crane who is the star of Psycho, and Halloween takes many of Psycho's elements and themes.

* SuddenSequelDeathSyndrome: Doctor Loomis and Michael ({{Ret Con}}ed later in ''Film/Halloween4TheReturnOfMichaelMyers'').

* ThePublicDomainChannel: Every tv is always playing Film/NightOfTheLivingDead1968 on repeat.

** Michael breaks into a school and drives a knife into a child's drawing of their family, specifically the young girl depicted. Loomis remarks "sister", at the sight, clearly drawing a parallel between Michael's vandalism and his killing of his sister fifteen years prior. [[spoiler:After TheReveal, it becomes clear that Michael was expressing hatred for his ''younger'' sister as well.]]

* ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice: Michael stabs many people with his knife.